I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

A Day in the Life of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs liked to spend his mornings in face-to-face meetings with his product and management teams, his afternoons in the design lab with Apple’s top designer Jony Ive, and his evenings sitting around the long wooden table in the kitchen at his home in Palo Alto, California, having dinner with his wife and kids.

“Steve was very, very strict about filtering out what he thought of as distractions,” Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography on Steve Jobs, said in an interview today with the Harvard Business Review. “People would come to him with all sorts of problems — legal problems, personnel problems, whatever. And if he didn’t want to deal with it, he would not focus on it. He’d give you sort of a blank stare. He would not answer, he wouldn’t answer email…He would pick four or five things that were really important for him to focus on and then just filter out — almost brutally — filter out the rest.”

Isaacson spoke with the Harvard Business Review about a story he wrote for the April issue of the magazine, called “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.” In the story, Isaacson points out 14 things that business leaders, wanting to take a cue from Jobs, should consider. The lessons are grouped under headings including “Focus,” “Simplify,” “Put Products Before Profits,” “Don’t Be a Slave to Focus Groups,” and “Bend Reality.”

“The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business,” Isaacson writes in the story. “He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.”

Isaacson said today that there was a routine to Jobs’ day, which centered around the face-to-face meetings that he loved. “He said in this digital age when we think we can do things by email and Skype and online chats, it’s really important to bump into people face to face, to hash things out, to look them in the eye, to yell at them and scream at them, and then to hug them and to know emotionally what they’re thinking.”

He had a Monday executive team meeting and a Wednesday afternoon marketing team meeting, in which formal presentations were banned. “No agenda, no PowerPoint presentations. Just hash it out and be willing to defend what you want to do and not sit there showing me a deck but having a real interaction, a real, brutally honest one where everyone can say whatever they want.”

After a morning of product review meetings, he would spend afternoons, when he could, “clearing his mind” by joining Ive in the heavily-guarded ground floor design center on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. “I’ve been in the situation room in the White House a couple of times as a tourist,” Isaacson said, with a laugh. “Getting into the situation room in the White House seems easy compared to getting into this design studio.”

“There in this serene studio, with shielded frost-tinted windows and the leaves from the trees dappling from the outside and New Age or Jazz music playing, were about eight industrial tables filled with foam models of future products,” Isaacson said. “Steve Jobs and Jony Ive would walk around, sometimes for an hour or two, just feeling the products, turning them over. Steve would say ‘This doesn’t feel right to me’ or ‘This is beautiful but let’s make it with a touch screen and do it this way.’ It would let him focus… on the sweep of future products they had and what they would look like and whether they would be beautiful.”

In the evenings, Jobs preferred spending time with family, shunning the life of a celebrity, Isaacson said. “He didn’t go to a lot of fancy dinners. He didn’t go out very much. He didn’t go to galas or get himself feted. And once he had children, he didn’t travel much. He came home and sat at a nice long wooden table in the kitchen of the house in Palo Alto. And even though he was often distracted, and even though he could be a bit snippy at times with people around him, he was there at dinner every night with his kids and his great wife.”

Isaacson said that while he appreciated Jobs’ candor throughout many hours of interviews, and in encouraging his co-workers, family and peers to talk about his life, he was also puzzled by Jobs’ openness, given his well-known penchant for privacy throughout his life. Jobs, who died in October a few weeks before Isaacson’s bio was published, told him he wanted the book to be an “honest” look at his life and legacy.

“He astounded me with the intimacy and the openness about people, about ideas, about strategies, about family, about what was valuable, about his place on the Earth, and his mission and why he cared about things,” Isaacson said. “In the end, it was clear what his passions were and how he felt. As he said to me near the end of his life, he had taken a lot out of the flow of history, as we all do — things that people do in the flow of history that helps us be where we are. And so what really counts is what you put back into the flow of history, those things that you make that people after you will use.”

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